Robert Walker

About Robert Walker

Robert A. Walker received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1988. He joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1989, and moved to the Computer Science Department at Kent State University in 1996, where served one year as Interim Department Chair and four years as Department Chair (20••••10). In 2010 he coordinated a team to form an interdisciplinary \"digital sciences\" program, and became the founding Director of the new School of Digital Sciences in April 2011. For 18 years (1992 to 2009), he was deeply involved with the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA), serving as Secretary / Treasurer, Newsletter Editor, Chair, and Past Chair. He received the SIGDA Meritorious Service Award in 1997, and the SIGDA Distinguished Service Award in 2006 \"for dedicated service as SIGDA Chair (20••••05) and over a decade of service to SIGDA, DAC, and the EDA profession\".Dr. Walker is very active in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), where he served six years as one of three Representatives from the SIG Governing Board to the ACM Council. He also serves on the ACM Council\'s Awards Committee as Chair of the Senior Member Committee. More recently, he has joined the ACM Women\'s Council (ACM-W), leading an effort to increase recognition of women in computing. He received the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award in June 2008 \"for a sustained record of dedicated and conscientious leadership within the ACM Special Interest Groups, including service as Chair of the SIG Governing Board, Chair of SIGDA, SGB Representative to Council, as well as leadership in ACM conference organization\".He is a Lifetime Member and Distinguished Member of the ACM, a Senior Member of the and a member of ACM/SIGDA, ACM/SIGARCH, ACM/SIGCSE, Computer Society, Circuits and Systems Society, and Sigma Xi.Specialties: Dr. Walker\'s early research interests were in the field of high-level synthesis, in particular the scheduling and design space exploration problems.His more recent work has focused on novel architectures for embedded systems. He and many of his students have explored the use of associative SIMD computing techniques on FPGAs. With another student, he is exploring techniques for improving instruction cache performance in embedded systems.

Experience

1. Professor of Computer Science

   Kent State University

   Jul 2010 — Present

Education

• Tennessee Technological University

  BS, Electrical Engineering

  1977 — 1981

• Carnegie Mellon University

  PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering

  1983 — 1988

• Carnegie Mellon University

  MS, Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering)

  1981 — 1983

Skills

• Computer Science
• Algorithms
• Parallel Computing
• Embedded Systems
• Higher Education
• Computer Architecture
• Distributed Systems
• C
• Parallel Programming
• University Teaching
• Higher Education Administration
• Computer Engineering
• Enterprise Architecture
• Travel Photography